Quarantine Tank

[Bruno]

While waiting for tanks to cycle I have been doing reading, and am considering setting up a quarantine tank so all my hard work on getting the tanks ready isnt for nothing. How many here use one? My biggest concern is my bacteria - obviously I want a 'cycled' tank for quarantine use, but how do I keep it cycled between buying fish or to be ready as a hospital tank?
 
I have a Penguin 150 HOB filter in one tank and a Penquin 200 in the other. Both have a combo fibre/carbon cartridge and then a bio wheel, but both have room for 2 of the cartridges. I had intended to discontinue use of the cartridges once I was out and just use some floss, sponge or cut fibre in those spots, but if I used the second slot for some fibre, would that be sufficient to pull out and use in a box filter for the quarantine or hospital?
 
I dont want the tank running all the time with me injecting ammonia every day to keep it ready, so looking for another way to set one up quickly when needed.
 
What do you do? Any ideas?

 

[This Old Spouse]

I keep a separate HOB filter running on my 29g along with the Fluval canister, so when I need to set up a QT I can just fill a 5 or 10g tank with treated water and move the HOB to it and it's instantly cycled.

 

[fluttermoth]

I keep spare sponges in my external, but you can cut sponges in HOB or internal filters up.
 
Do bear in mind that your media will only be able to support the same amount of fish as it is in your main tank. So, if you take a quarter of the media from your main filter, and you have 20 guppies in your main tank, your QT tank can support five guppies, with that media.
 
Hope that makes sense!

 

[Bruno]

Makes complete sense, though what happens in your main tank? In that senario you lost 25% of your bacteria but have the same amount of fish... so how fast will the bacteria come back up to speed? How much stress are you putting on the main tank? I am assuming there would be a need to do more frequest water tests and likely PWC as well, but for how long?
 
I am also thinking this through for my scenerio... I have a 37G going thru a fishless cycle. Once it is ready, I could go and get close to a full stocking depending on fish and I am good to go. But I dont want to introduce something into my tank that could jeapordize the health of my tank and its filter by extention, so I opt to set up a 10G quarantine tank, move some filter media over, and I can introduce some fish to it. I am not sure what is going into the 37G for now, so lets say swordtails - maybe 6 as I am using only 25% filter media and have a small tank in comparison? That 25% media should be pretty strong from the fishless cycle though, and during the quarantine I keep adding ammonia to the main tank to keep the bacteria there alive, and in fact it likely produces more bacteria to make up for what I removed. After 2 weeks my fish are all healthy so I do a large water change in the 37G, test etc and then acclimitize the 6 swordtails to the new tank water and move them in. So far so good...
 
Now in the main tank, I likely am producing quite a bit less ammonia with 6 small fish then I was dosing, so does bacteria now die off in the filter as it resets for 6 fish? So now how many fish can I go buy and put in my quarantine tank for the next addition? Say I do a rummynose tetra - if I get 6 the quarantine should be able to handle that as it just gave up 6 fish, but after the 2 weeks I would be doubling the load in my main tank, which doesn't sound like a good idea. Any way around this? or do I have to go with a smaller school the second go around? As my 37 reaches capacity I can see this would be less of an issue, but initially doubling the fish seems like asking for trouble...